In 1929 Maurice Fatio, the Swiss-born architect to the Vanderbilts, Wide>ners, Phippses and other celebrities of late-1920s and 1930s Palm Beach, Florida, society, built a palatial villa in his signature Renaissance Revival style to house the Indian Creek Country Club on Indian Creek Island.

Others gradually sprang up around it, some rivaling Fatio’s in splendor. The most recent of them is an amply scaled, 50-room, 34,000-square-foot residence with an equally amply scaled interior designed by Marjorie Shushan, whose first commission many years ago was also a large house on Indian Creek Island. Today she is back with what she jokingly calls “something like a majority share in Indian Creek decorating.”

“The whole has to not just look good, it has to feel good. The grander the house, the greater the need to make it comfortable.”

Shushan had already worked for the same client on a place in the Florida-Spanish-Mediterranean style (an outgrowth of Addison Mizner’s work in Palm Beach in the teens and 1920s), when he approached her about a new project. “The client’s tastes grew up from that traditional Florida look,” she reports; he did not want to “just go on with another traditional Florida-Spanish-Mediterranean house.” Instead, he wanted something with the spirit of homes like James Deering’s Vizcaya.

To interpret his vision, Shushan introduced the client to New Haven, Connecticut–based architect Ernesto Buch, who in turn brought in fellow architects Maria de la Guardia and Teofilo Victoria, of de la Guardia Victoria Architects & Urbanists, a husband-and-wife team from Coral Gables, Florida. The result is a house that is adamantly Neoclassical—from the Doric columns at the forecourt’s gate and at the main entrance to the waterfront elevation, with its tall three-arched loggia and its symmetrical three-arched wings.

The interiors are imbued with a similarly classical feel, thanks to Shushan and her frequent collaborator, interior architect Brian O’Keefe. “You have to see that the interior belongs to the exterior you’ve just seen before you enter. It all has to balance, to go hand-in-hand, to give complete continuity from exterior to interior,” says the designer. “Symmetry plays a big role.” Significantly, though, “the whole has to not just look good, it has to feel good. The grander the house, the greater the need to make it comfortable,” Shushan continues, “and there can be no rooms with little purpose. Rooms with little purpose occur all too often in big houses; however, there are many rooms in this house, and every room has a clear purpose. You can live in any corner of any room in great comfort.”

Shushan believes in unifying interiors with texture rather than style or color. “I don’t pay attention to style,” she says, and the furnishings and art used in the décor run from Han Dynasty to New York photo-realism, with all bases covered along the marble-paved way, and all seamlessly orchestrated. The highly eclectic antique details accenting the dominantly contemporary furnishings, she explains, “are comfort making. There’s a mix of the classic with a modernizing 21st-century eye.”

Reflecting on the three years it took to complete the project, Shushan notes, “I went into this job with a client that didn’t want to bring anything he had before, so I had to purchase everything. Yet from the time they dug the first shovel of earth, as a designer I knew I must commit to interiors that look like they do belong to the client and like they do belong to the house. Then, when there was enough built to give a feeling of place, I took off from that. I moved from room to room very subtly, with great attention to detail. I have a very quiet look, totally restrained, and I’m thoughtful with important things like color. I only put color in a subtle sort of way—usually when a room is almost finished. I don’t know any other way.”

That being said, there are throughout Shushan’s subtly ever-so-stylish interiors many visual moments that she admits are a “Wow!” And there is her own “celebratory nobilization” and “organic sense of space” in the Indian Creek villa that fulfills its inspiration.